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Ezra Pound's Encounter with Wang Wei: Toward the 'Ideogrammic Method' of the Cantos University of New Orleans ScholarWorks@UNO English Faculty Publications Department of English and Foreign Languages Fall 1993 Ezra Pound's Encounter with Wang Wei: Toward the 'Ideogrammic Method' of The Cantos Zhaoming Qian University of New Orleans, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.uno.edu/engl_facpubs Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Qian, Zhaoming. "Ezra Pound's Encounter with Wang Wei: Toward the 'Ideogrammic Method' of The Cantos." Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal 39.3 (1993): 266-282. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of English and Foreign Languages at ScholarWorks@UNO. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UNO. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Ezra Pound's Encounter with Wang Wei: Toward the "Ideogrammic Method" of The Cantos Author(s): Zhaoming Qian Source: Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Autumn, 1993), pp. 266-282 Published by: Hofstra University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/441687 . Accessed: 02/05/2011 16:06 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=hofstra. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Hofstra University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Twentieth Century Literature. http://www.jstor.org Ezra Pound's Encounter with Wang Wei: Towardthe "IdeogrammicMethod" of The Cantos ZHAOMING QIAN In Ezra Pound Among the Poets, edited by George Bornstein, Li Po is recognized as one of Pound's major influences. Pound himself acknowledged his debt to the Chinese poet by introducing Cathay(1915) as a book "for the most part from the Chinese of Rihaku [Li Po]" (P 130). Li Po, however, was not the only T'ang poet who influenced Pound in his early career. New evidence shows that after the publication of Cathay Pound continued to explore Chinese poetry through the Fenollosa Notebooks,' and that the poet who claimed a strong appeal for him during this period, the period that witnessed Pound's extraordinary experiments in pursuit of forms for The Cantos, was Li Po's contemporary Wang Wei (699-759), or Omakitsu, as he is called by Fenollosa. I take for proof of this neglected encounter Pound's own statements made on various occasions between mid-1916 and early 1919. The first of such statements is to be found in Pound's letter to Iris Barry, dated 24 August 1916: "I have spent the day with Wang Wei, eighth century Jules Laforgue Chinois" (L 144). With it we can determine the date when Pound began his serious dialogue with Wang Wei. In addition, we are enabled to see why Pound should at this point show such enthusiasm for the T'ang painter-poet: he saw in him a modern sensibility and a likeness to the French symbolist Jules Laforgue. Pauline Yu contends that "Wang Wei's work is a fulfillment of several key Symbolist aims" (Poetry 22). To illustrate this, she enumerates as many as four poetic notions shared by the T'ang poet 266 EZRAPOUND AND WANG WEI and the symbolists.2 Thus Pound's comparison of Wang Wei to Laforgue confirms his critical perceptivity. In Wang Wei he apparently discovered the possibility of further modernizing his style by combining the French and Chinese influences. Pound made a second statement about Wang Wei in his letter to Kate Buss, dated 4 January 1917. There he again emphasizes Wang Wei's modernity and his resemblance to the French Symbolists: "Omakitsu is the real modern-even Parisian-of VIII cent. China-" (L 154). This seems to indicate that Pound was continuing his study of Wang Wei in early 1917 (when he was almost ready to publish "Three Cantos"). Nevertheless, it was not until November 1918 (when he was rewriting Ur-Canto 4) that he brought out a short version of Wang Wei's poem in The Little Review: Dawn on the Mountain Peach flowers turn the dew crimson, Green willows melt in the mist, The servant will not sweep up the fallen petals, And the nightingales Persist in their singing. Omakitsu Apparently Pound was not satisfied with his translation, for he remarked in an essay on Remy de Gourmont (another French Symbolist he admired), in the February 1919 issue of the same magazine: "I do not think it possible to overemphasize Gourmont's sense of beauty. The mist clings to the lacquer. His spirit was the spirit of Omakitsu; his pays natal was near to the peach-blossom-fountain of the untranslatable poem" (LE 343). Here Pound is of course comparing de Gourmont's sense of beauty to that of Wang Wei. "The mist clings to the lacquer" is an image from another section of "Dawn on the Mountain," which, in Pound's view, vividly sums up de Gourmont's-and perhaps also Laforgue's and the Prufrock Eliot's-sensibility. Wang Wei's spirit indeed entered Pound's Ur-Cantos along with other influences of the period. In a fragment among his early drafts for Canto 4 Pound laments for his lost adolescence, using Wang Wei's sensual image as an analogy: When you find that feminine contact has no longer the richness of Omakitsu's verses, Know then, o man, that the Cytherean has turned from you, fugges! 267 TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE When the smoke no longer hangs clings upon the lacquer, When the night air no longer clings to your cuticle, When the air has in it no mystery about her, Know then that the days of your adolence [sic] are ended fugaces, fugges, fugus (Qtd. in Froula 103) Christine Froula in her study of the genesis of Canto 4 takes pains to show how Pound created the "seven enigmatic lines [that] follow the wind poem"-"Smoke hangs on the stream, /The peach-trees shed bright leaves in the water, / Sound drifts in the evening haze, / The bark scrapes at the ford, / Gilt rafters above black water, / Three steps in an open field, / Gray stone-posts leading .. ." (C 16)-by fusing the "smoke" image with other images from Wang Wei's poetry. According to her the other images in the passage-"the stream," "The peach-trees," "The bark," "the ford," "an open field," etc.-are taken from Fenollosa's version of Wang Wei's poem "Peach Source Song" (40-41), and her assertion is certainly correct. Wang Wei's "Peach Source Song" is known in Chinese literary history as an admirable effort by the poet at the age of nineteen to recreate his fifth-century precursor T'ao Ch'ien's prose narrative "Peach-blossom Fountain." In T'ao Ch'ien's original work the narrator recounts how a fisherman lost his way among a grove of peach trees and found "a new world of level country, of fine houses, of rich fields, of fine pools, and of luxuriance of mulberry and bamboo." He was told that the ancestors of these people, some five hundred years before, had taken refuge to escape tyranny and war and that "they had remained, cut off completely from the rest of the human race" (Giles 130-31). Pound, who had read H. A. Giles's version of T'ao Ch'ien's allegory, must have recognized the literary relation between the two equally brilliant works: hence his reference to Wang Wei's poem using T'ao Ch'ien's original image ("the peach- blossom-fountain of the untranslatable poem") in his 1919 article. Pound was introduced to the Chinese painter-poet much earlier than the summer of 1916. Indeed, he may have already heard about Wang Wei in 1909 from his friend Laurence Binyon, organizer of the 268 EZRAPOUND AND WANG WEI Far Eastern art works at the British Museum.3 Moreover, as a frequenter of the British Museum he may have contemplated in its Gallery of Prints and Drawings two famous Chinese landscape paintings, one attributed to Wang Wei and one ("Landscape of the Wang Chuan") by the Sung painter Chao Meng-fu after Wang Wei.4 In Painting in the Far East (1908) Binyon describes Wang Wei as the "founder of the southern school" of Chinese landscape painting, who was "even more famous for his poetry than for his painting." "Of Wang Wei," Binyon notes, "it was said that his poems were pictures, and his pictures poems" (74). Even if Pound hadn't read Painting in the Far East (which is unlikely), he would have gotten the information all the same from Binyon when viewing the above-mentioned paintings. Pound could also have learned something about Wang Wei from Fenollosa's Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, compiled by his widow, Mary McNeil Fenollosa (which he probably read shortly before his meeting with Mrs.
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